Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory)

Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory)

Language: English

Pages: 232

ISBN: 0803246277

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Drawing on literary theory and canonical French literature, Reading Unruly examines unruliness as both an aesthetic category and a mode of reading conceived as ethical response. Zahi Zalloua argues that when faced with an unruly work of art, readers confront an ethical double bind, hesitating then between the two conflicting injunctions of either thematizing (making sense) of the literary work, or attending to its aesthetic alterity or unreadability.

Creatively hesitating between incommensurable demands (to interpret but not to translate back into familiar terms), ethical readers are invited to cultivate an appreciation for the unruly, to curb the desire for hermeneutic mastery without simultaneously renouncing meaning or the interpretive endeavor as such. Examining French texts from Montaigne’s sixteenth-century Essays to Diderot’s fictional dialogue Rameau’s Nephew and Baudelaire’s prose poems The Spleen of Paris, to the more recent works of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, and Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Reading Unruly demonstrates that in such an approach to literature and theory, reading itself becomes a desire for more, an ethical and aesthetic desire to prolong rather than to arrest the act of interpretation.

 

The Elementary Particles

Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man (Classic Reprint)

Nestor Burma. Premières Enquètes

Barbara Wright: Translation as Art

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hermeneutic self-mastery à la Seneca (as expressed in his desire to be “master of [him]self in every direction” [III, 5, 639b] [“maistre de [s]oy, à tout sens” (841)]), only to come full circle, taking Seneca’s observation that “anything that can be added to is imperfect” as a condition for productive thinking rather than a prohibition.37 Monstrous Reading/Reading the Monstrous Montaigne’s skepticism can perhaps be ascertained most visibly in his resistance to the humanist ideology of his

normative judgments. Yet the narrator moves rather rapidly over this point, choosing instead to dwell on the nephew’s physical oddity: He has no greater opposite than himself. Sometimes he is thin and wan like a patient in the last stages of consumption; you could count his teeth through his skin; he looks as if he had been days without food or had just come out of a Trappist monastery. The next month, he is sleek and fat as if he ate regularly at a banker’s or had shut himself up in a

ethico-aesthetic judgment: “But a streak of derision was interwoven with these feelings and denatured them” (67) [“Mais une teinte de ridicule était fondue dans ces sentiments, et les dénaturait” (643)]. Critics for the most part have interpreted this critical supplement to the nephew’s more hospitable or favorable assessment in the context of Diderot’s own reflections, in Paradox on the Comedian, on the actor’s need for rational self-mastery and control over his emotions: 39 I say: “It is

cœur ou de l’esprit ont dans les yeux le plombé de la fièvre ou la nitescence anormale et bizarre de leur mal, dans le regard, l’intensité du surnaturalisme. (OC 2:594) The beautiful strangeness that marks Delacroix’s work violates the expectations of his bourgeois beholder, this “poor man” [“pauvre homme”], who, Baudelaire tells us, “has quite lost sight of the differences that mark the phenomena of the physical and the moral worlds, the natural and the supernatural” (SW 121) [“a perdu la

and displace Sartrean understanding76 — opens up the possibility for a different encounter with the work, one that makes Nausea less readable but more inventive, one that is less strictly faithful to its ideas but more responsive to its provocations. The nouveau roman (New Novel) is the focus of chapters 5 and 6. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy, in many ways, can be said to illustrate Robbe-Grillet’s modernist, if not postmodernist, bias against meaning, realism, and narration, captured by

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